The White House wants you to take your kids to the lab

JillianBerman

Thousands of students simulated particle collisions, chatted with astronauts and got a close up look at rare equipment, like a U.S. Navy exoskeleton, at labs across the country this week.

The field trips are part of National Week at the Labs, a new White House initiative aimed at getting more kids, particularly girls and students of color, interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). From Feb. 29 to March 5, which coincides with the last week of Black History Month and the first week of Women’s History Month, thousands of kids are visiting more than 50 scientific institutions in upwards of 20 states.

It’s no secret that women and people of color are woefully underrepresented in these in-demand and lucrative fields. The National Week at the Labs aims to get at one aspect of that problem by making sure young students of all backgrounds have the opportunity to see the people and places engaged in scientific work.

The event takes a page from the playbook of “take your child to work day,” said Megan Smith, the White House’s chief technology officer. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem launched that annual holiday in 1993 originally as “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” to help build young girls’ confidence by exposing them to adult working women.

“There’s a lot of challenges right now with who is choosing these careers, there’s a lot of systemic bias — mostly unconscious and institutional bias — that is steering some American kids away from these jobs,” said Smith, who in a prior life was a vice president at Google
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and award-winning engineer. “Having our children come to the labs and seeing all kinds of people doing these jobs is really important. You can’t be what you can’t see.”

At many of the nation’s most prominent tech companies, the situation isn’t much better. Women make up no more than 24% of workers with technology jobs at top Silicon Valley firms and black and Hispanic workers each account for less than 10% of technology workers at the same companies.

Smith cited encouraging efforts on this front such as a coalition of engineering schools that have agreed to update their curriculum so they’re focused more on hands-on real-world problem solving and diversity initiatives at a variety tech giants. The White House also has its own suite of programs, such as a demo day showcasing entrepreneurs from a variety of backgrounds, aimed at diversifying STEM fields at all levels.

But exposing kids early to the ways in which science and math impact the real world can complement these efforts by helping to ignite a “spark” in students, regardless of background, that will push them to pursue these subjects, Smith said. She recalled a requirement at her Buffalo grade school to participate in the science fair as one of the first experiences that started her on a path toward her engineering career. “You want the child themselves to be excited personally,” she said. “You want them to have that moment, where they’re like ‘I can do this.’”

Broderick Johnson, the chair of the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force, a White House effort to help expose young men of color to a wide variety of opportunities, witnessed some of those moments Wednesday at a Week at the Labs event at a Department of Energy lab in Upland, NY. The roughly 100 students at the event, mostly African-American high school students, spoke excitedly about topics like biochemistry and expressed interest in apprenticeships and internships at STEM-focused institutions, he said.

The benefits to young people who choose to pursue these careers can be enormous. STEM jobs are in high demand and typically pay much better than average. But getting more students from all backgrounds involved in science and technology is about more than just the students themselves, Johnson noted. The country needs more workers to fill the hundreds of thousands of STEM jobs that are fueling American innovation.

These efforts fit in with the broader goals of My Brother’s Keeper of both helping young people access opportunities they may not have otherwise and boosting the country at the same time, Johnson added. “Not only is this initiative important from a moral perspective to make this country more fair, and more just, and provide opportunity to kids, regardless of color,” he said, “but it’s important as an economic imperative.”

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